Issue: We

Citizens for Community Values (CCV), by its very designation, is an elitist and separatist collection of "citizens" threatened probably as much by the encroachment of others onto their rights as they are of the thought of a Heaven that'll look a lot like Earth. Using God as a teammate and a buffer to further their agenda of ensuring that mainly homosexuals shouldn't live with the full benefits and freedoms of, say, their kind is as blasphemous as they claim the possible repeal of Issue 3 to be.

God does not exist to prove our points or to elect our candidates. Rights aren't ingredients of a pie to be sliced and doled to only a few.

Negroes know this better than any American.

The black church is now rearing its monolithic head, allowing CCV chief Phil Burress and his colored stepbrother Charlie Winburn to propagate the backward language of Issue 3 throughout some of the city's largest black congregations like Tryed Stone Baptist Church on Reading Road.

As it stands, charter language remixed as Issue 3 is mightily confusing. It's akin to backward masking, messages encoded in music wherein a record must be pulled backward on the turntable to reveal the true language hidden in its grooves.

According to Voter, the guide distributed by the non-partisan League of Women Voters, Article 12 states: "The city of Cincinnati ... may not enact, adopt, enforce or administer any ordinance, regulation, rule or policy which provides that homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, status, conduct ...

or otherwise provides a person with the basis to have any claim of minority or protected status, quota preference or other preferential treatment."

Voters in 1993 approved this charter amendment in a voting debacle marked by head-spinning ballot language. But even though the language was as twisted as a Twista solo, really it was approved because homosexuals did no substantive work to block it.

Apathetic and entitled, they were shocked to find that the Queen City is the only American city with a law on its books specifically denying one group protection against discrimination. And they didn't do the work because surely, they thought, Cincinnatians can't be that fearful.

Well, we are. And in fewer than three weeks we get to try again and, still, where is this alleged gay community and its humanitarian backups to rail against the confusion and dissention being spread by Burress, Winburn, et al?

I'll take it from here. It's this simple: Vote yes to repeal Issue 3, or remove Article 12 from the city charter, if you're free, liberated, just and not homophobic. Conversely, vote no to keep the charter as it is if you're fearful, reactionary, homophobic and can willfully intellectualize using God as a weapon of mass destruction of humanity.

Keeping the charter as is leaves out a large segment of people who can be fired, evicted, demoted and set aside based on sexual preference. And if you think it can't happen in a city mean and small enough to have the language on its books in the first place, think again.

Deeper than a voting tactic, criminalizing homosexuality has become a right-wing pastime paradise. They use gay marriage as a battering ram against itself. What they're ignoring is the ignobility of the concept of mimicking traditional marriage as a failed and failing heterosexual ideal.

If the religious right spent as much time, money and energy saving and shoring up heterosexual marriage as they do trying to deny hard-headed homos access to it, there'd be far fewer hetero divorces, Mike Allen-caliber sex scandals and resulting fucked-up kids.

Further, if Negroes continue buying into the okey-doke of separatism exacerbated by their own homophobia, we'll get what we deserve -- a further splintered subculture that's as mean-spirited and myopic as the majority culture we long to emulate but who'll never fully validate our parking.

If this is partially a God issue, as right-wingers want us to believe, we should do as Jesus. He hung out with thieves, the whores, the poor and the miscreants. And the Bible contains no definitive Scripture that clearly comes out on, pun intended, homosexuality.

Like other parcels of humanity, it's up to the individual to reckon herself with God's judgment.

My salvation is guaranteed. And I can't wait to see Burress and Winburn in Heaven. If they get in.

Kathy's collection of columns, Your Negro Tour Guide: Truths in Black and White, is available in bookstores now.